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Excerpted from Edmund Burke Feldman, Thinking about Art, 1985, pp. 190 – 195.

The Rococo
The Rococo was really a continuation in a lighter, more graceful, vein of tendencies already established in the Baroque.
Like the Baroque it was open, dynamic, and convoluted. Beyond that, it was asymmetrical and somewhat sketchy.
Usually aristocratic in its patronage and realistic in appearance, the Rococo differed from the Baroque in that it was
almost always decorative in effect.

We often describe the Baroque as exuberant. In the Rococo that exuberance becomes self-conscious; it develops a sense
of humor and turns into wit. Now, wit relies on reason, a sense of proportion that tells us when means and ends are
ridiculously out of touch. For reasonable people Baroque rhetoric and grandiosity could be enjoyed only if taken with a
grain of salt. These people were too urbane and civilized to enjoy a propagandistic art; it was important to be charming
rather than serious. So Baroque style became playful: it evolved into a game; it became the Rococo.

The term "Rococo" derives from rocaille, the French word for a decorative
arrangement of rocks and seashells, plants and vines. These natural forms were
copied literally in eighteenth century ornament. Their basic lines and rhythms
were carried into figurative art, landscape painting, and decoration; we sense
their influence in hairstyles, draperies, clouds, tree branches, and architectural
designs. The Rococo spiral replaced the Baroque oval, which had replaced the
Renaissance circle. Rococo decoration was an escape from fixed centers,
symmetrical outlines, and dark, heavy forms.

Architecturally speaking, the Rococo had no particular meaning: it was mainly

a style of ornament and interior decoration. Nevertheless, Rococo spaces have
a distinctive look. Most obvious is the heavy reliance on painted ornament as
opposed to architectural relief and deeply carved effects. There is a certain
amount of carved wood framing, but it is kept fairly flat and delicate. Color
harmonies based on gold and white, or pink, blue, green, and white, are used to
generate the sunny, light-hearted feeling which is the chief aim of Rococo
decoration. We should remember that the Rococo was a style that aimed to
please rather than instruct. Rococo scrolls, rosettes, and acanthus leaves were
beautifully executed but were not meant to be taken seriously as expressive
form.
In the eighteenth century, furniture became a major concern of the
middle and upper classes. Armies of servants were required to care for a
world of mirrors, chairs, settees, desks, commodes, and armoires. They
created a new occupation: dusting and polishing. The Rococo also made
generous use of mirrors framed with stylized botanical forms covered
with gold leaf. These mirrors and their reflections created a world of
bouncing light and playful space. Eventually, as in the Hall of Mirrors at
Versailles, the mirror transcended decorative usage: It turned into a
device for generating dazzling illusions—so dazzling that large paintings
were almost superfluous. The mirror was the perfect symbol of the
Rococo spirit: it expressed the ideals of an essentially narcissistic culture,
a culture that enjoyed looking at itself.

4-58. JULES HARDOUIN-MANSART and CHARLES LE BRUN. Hall of

Mirrors, Palace of Versailles. c. 1680. One side of this long hall is
covered with tall mirrors; the other side consists of windows facing
the immense park pictured in Patel's Versailles. Thus, the king and
his courtiers could move back and forth in a sumptuously decorated
tunnel poised between two kinds of illusion—one of nature
permanently subordinated to the sovereign's will; the other of
themselves splendidly and endlessly repeated in glass.
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It almost seems as if French painting has become a branch of interior decoration. Architecture, on the other hand, is taken
very seriously. Nevertheless, the French Rococo produced three painters of genius: Jean-Antoine Watteau, Francois
Boucher, and Jean-Honore Fragonard. They converted decorative painting into a type of visual music which, if one
listened carefully, disclosed several of the melodies that would be sung by the voices of modernism.
4-59. ANTOINE WATTEAU. A Pilgrimage to
Cythera (detail). 1717. Oil on canvas. The
Louvre, Paris This type of picture was called
a fetes galante, a painting in which real or
fictitious persons—beautifully dressed and
coiffured—go on a picnic to a romantic island
or to a well-manicured park. It differs from a
Rubensian frolic in that all the people are
clothed, their deportment is proper and
courteous, and there is more talk about love
than action. From the soft haze in which
these figures appear, we can tell that
Watteau was a Rubeniste, a devotee of color
rather than line (like the Poussinistes), but
his people are decidedly slimmer and more
elegant that those of Rubens. They also
exhibit very unRubensian emotions like
sweetness, wistfulness, and sadness about
the transience of love. Unlike the Baroque,
the Rococo tries to capture the nuances of
feelings and form.

Watteau (1684-1721) was the Rococo poet of bittersweet romance. If we compare his fetes galantes, or garden parties,
with Rubens' gardens of love, it is clear that love has undergone a profound transformation. For one thing, Watteau prefers
clothed figures. His pictures show a great deal of silk and crinoline but not much flesh. Nevertheless, a considerable
amount of erotic thinking goes on. Watteau does not pretend, like Rubens, that his aristocrats are Greek gods and
goddesses at play; instead they are beautifully dressed, contemporary ladies and gentlemen strolling and chatting in
natural settings that resemble painted theatrical sets. Rubens' gardens were more natural; they showed few signs of human
cultivation. His men were more "natural," too; they grabbed at women. Watteau’s men
gain their objectives through conversation. Everyone flirts and someone makes an
occasional pass. But we may be sure that every embrace follows an invitation—spoken
or implied by gesture. Just as nature has been subdued in the carefully manicured
gardens of Versailles, so also have the natural passions been tamed. In Watteau, love has
become a game rather than a war between the sexes.

Compared to Watteau, Francois Boucher (1703-70) is more openly erotic. For one thing,
he usually paints nudes, whereas Watteau's people are always fashionably overdressed.
Boucher can execute realistic portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes, but his
mythological allegories represent his most distinctive contribution to eighteenth century
painting. He invented the girl-goddess, the sex symbol that captured the French
imagination from Fragonard to Renoir and that eventually passed into the debased
currency of our "pop" culture.

Boucher was really a superior sort of decorator. His main purpose was to use dimpled
cheeks, fluttering draperies, pale blue skies, white foam, and green waves to create
theater of sweet sensuality. Boucher represented love as healthy, innocent fun; he
converted the bedroom into a playground. He was perhaps the first European painter to
advance the idea that sex has nothing to do with sin or guilt. Curiously, men are almost
totally absent from his pictures. Perhaps they symbolized the wrong principle: force,
harshness, brutality.

Boucher, Cupid a Captive, 1754.

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A student of Boucher, Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1732-1806 carried on his
master's dedication to idle love but with a style that owed more to Rubens and
Tiepolo. Fragonard had a very fast brush. He could sketch rapidly with paint,
giving tree trunks, leaves, drapery, and women's bodies a loose but convincing
definition of form; he created a delightful marriage of human bodies and natural
vegetation. Like Boucher, he used lush landscape elements (billowing clouds,
twisted tree limbs, and waterfalls of foliage) to suggest a musical accompaniment
to the accidental meeting of lovers in parks and gardens. The scenes are painted
with such a fresh touch that we can think of Fragonard as a kind godfather of
Impressionism. Surely he was Renoir's idol although Renoir never caught on to
Fragonard's light, airy drawing.

4-60. JEAN-HONORE FRAGONARD. The Meeting (also called The Surprise).

1171-73. Oil on canvas, 12'5" x 8'. The Frick Collection, New York Another
essay on the subject of aristocratic flirtation. This painting was one of a
series, called The Progress of Love, which was made to decorate the
apartment of Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV. She didn't like
it. Other titles by Fragonard are The Stolen Kiss and Cupid Stealing a
Nightgown.

4-61. GIOVANNI BATTISTA

TIEPOLO. Apollo Conducting Beatrice
of Burgundy to Frederick
Barbarossa. 1751-52. Ceiling fresco.
Kaisersaal, Episcopal Palace,
Wurzburg. In Tiepolo, Venetian
painting and the Rococo style
reached their light, airy culmination.
They might lack substance, yet
extraordinary skill was required to
create such buoyant illusions,
especially to unify several
perspectives in a single painting. The
viewer looking up at an oval ceiling
by Tiepolo could even experience a
feeling of vertigo, a sense of being
swept up into the heavens with
those airborne gods, goddesses, and
horses.

Italy’s outstanding exponent of the Rococo, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), was perhaps the supreme fresco
painter of the eighteenth century, and a master of ceiling illusionism. His work represents the fulfillment of all the
vivacious, decorative tendencies in the Venetian tradition. Tiepolo's technique was the logical extension of Titian's
fascination with rich fabrics and Tintoretto's fluid brushwork. Compared to Boucher, he relied on the dynamics of the
human figure more than ornamental shrubs and garden furniture. Tiepolo could paint some very gaseous cloud effects, but
he was mainly a figurative designer. His people remind us of singers in an opera by Mozart. Indeed, Tiepolo's saints and
madonnas may have established the model of deportment that grand opera sopranos follow to this day.

So Tiepolo covered the palace ceilings of German princes and archbishops with angels and saints and heavenly vistas. At
the same time, the painting of Roman ruins was developing as an important specialty in Italy. It was part of the incipient
romanticism of the eighteenth century, although Poussin had been an early player of the game. It seems that as Rome's
power declined, its antiquarian interests grew. In part, this was stimulated by papal sponsorship of archaeological studies
and a new Vatican policy of historical preservation. In addition, tourism had become an important source of Italian
income, notably in Venice, which joined Rome as a magnet for European gentlemen of poetical or scholarly interests.
When it came to classical ruins, Rome was incomparable, but in Venice the Renaissance seemed to come alive. There one
could see spectacles that looked as if they had been painted by Tintoretto—especially at the great Carnival which closed
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the Season. Skillfully executed by Canaletto and Guardi, Venetian scenes, or vedute, sold by the thousands to Europe's
touring gentry. What souvenirs they were!

4-62. FRANCESCO GUARDI. View of the

Rialto. c. 1780. Oil on canvas, 27 x 36".
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(Widener Collection, 1942)
Impressionism has many ancestors and
Guardi is one of them. Perhaps living
close to the water stimulates the
development of a painterly technique
that can capture shimmering reflections
and the effects of changeable light
conditions. Like the Impressionists a
century later, Guardi made good use of
thick-and-thin paint, short flickering
brush strokes, and something that
resembles broken color. He also studied
the quality of light more than the actual
structure of buildings and bridges.

There was, however, a somber sort of

Rococo. We see it in the engravings of
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (see p. 431), a
master of spatial illusions. Piranesi (1720-78)
had been trained as an architect and was a
serious student of classical archaeology. He
employed every device of perspective,
lighting, and scale to create a highly
theatrical idea of antiquity. Using a low angle
of vision and the Baroque device of placing
small figures against huge architectural
forms, he produced mystery and excitement
in the same places where Poussin had seen
pure reason and majestic calm. Oddly
enough, Piranesi's ruins are more
archaeologically correct.

But Piranesi's etchings go beyond the

romantic evocation of antiquity; they also
express a late Baroque ambivalence about
classicism. This is clear in his series of
4-63. GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI. The Prisons. See fig. 10-32 imaginary Roman prisons, or carceri. Huge
masonry machines that never existed, they
impress the spectator by their size and command of all the dimensions of space. Piranesi's play with perspective generates
a completely credible world; it seems we can wander endlessly in its geometric innards. Yet, those prisons are terrible,
surrealistic dreams; they look like infernal man-traps created by the scientific imagination. Perhaps the eighteenth century
had begun to wonder about the implications of Descartes' pure rationalism. Even if his geometry and his space coordinates
provided a true picture of the universe, was it possible for that universe to turn into a gigantic prison?
.